Wire business journalists labor under bad management tactics

Ryan Tate of Gawker has a nice story about how the business journalists at Bloomberg News are not the only ones laboring under a management by fear operating style.

Tate reports, “Our AP source says a majority of the staff — 90 percent, this person claims — are about to send a jointly-signed letter to Business Editor Hal Ritter accusing him of ‘installing a culture of fear.’ Chief among their complaints: An annual review process ‘in which the entire staff is slammed.’ Why would the news cooperative’s management want to demoralize staff like that? One theory is that the negative reviews would allow the newswire to cut more staff loose without having to pay severance.

“Then there’s Reuters, and its ‘Beats and Exclusives’ scoop-tracking system — ‘the bastard twin to the one at Bloomberg,’ as one source described it, in which the act of breaking news first is recorded via written ‘notes.’

“The ‘Beats and Exclusives’ system wasn’t a very big deal until this year, when for the first time it will be used as the basis for pay, says our source, following an impasse in negotiations between Reuters and a union to which its journalists belong. Now ‘reporters who don’t file the requisite number of beats and exclusives will take it in the paycheck, so to speak.'”

Read more here.